Got the Gen 8 Starter trio shaded!
(Original Smogon used Gen 1 starter "Sprites", used here for comparing scale)
(Blender Rendered Gen 8 starters in my newly revamped 3DS mimicking shaders and composites)
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(Larger Blender Renders of the Gen 8 starters with 2px outline thickness)
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Not looking too shabby I say. I really would like to see Showdown to keep its consistent look with using 3DS style renders, and the only way to do that is to make new renders of the Gen 8 Pokemon ourselves somehow. I'm still waiting on if it's even possible to import animations ripped from the game, which then hopefully can be applied to the models' armatures in Blender.
It is being looked into though by someone who has made tools to rip the models from the game in the first place. I hope that they succeed. Because honestly, it won't take that much time to churn out renders with Pokemon from Gen 8. The only roadblocks I can really foresee is nailing certain special effects some Pokemon use, especially fire/ghost effects, if there are any (haven't looked too deeply into the new Pokemon yet). Probably won't be nearly as hard to do as it was before with previous inferior methods I used to mimic the 3DS style of shading, but I still need to look into it.
I also don't suppose that,
if the animation rips work out, maybe this would warrant making a new thread for? Would anyone be willing to chip in their thoughts on this? I'm also not aware if there's already existing projects that will just take screencaps from the SwSh games to get animated "sprites" of all of the Pokemon in the game (not just Gen 8 mons for the sake of consistency I would presume, if this is happening). I hope I'm not barging into anything. But I do genuinely think Showdown would work best if it kept the 3DS style shading for consistency with the entire Pokedex, as well as just considering general aesthetics and optimization (Gen 8 shading uses a lot more colors, and probably won't look very good unless the animated "sprites" get a good bump in resolution universally compared to the old 3DS style "sprites"... those are just my thoughts though).